Posted on 10 April 2008 by Jack No Comments

What is the future of web analytics?

For larger organisations, I expect that we will see greater involvement with web analytics, by Customer Analytics/Business Intelligence departments, as web analytics moves from reporting to data mining, scoring and aggregation of online and offline data.

In particular, there are three areas in which web analytics will add value in the next couple of years:

1. Web analytics integration with CRM
2. Multivariate testing and optimisation
3. Analytics driven Dynamic Content

The breakthrough has really been the data warehouse solutions provided by vendors such as Omniture, Webtrends, Unica, SAS. Although the first of these was launched a couple of years ago, it is only now that we are starting to see these being fully utilised by organisations.

Instead of just looking at summarised data, web analysts now have access to granular data that can be segmented, scored, or merged with offline data if ids exist.

Any Data Analyst would tell you that getting access to granular data is a key requirement for good analytics.

It is the granular data that has allowed a greater convergence with marketing. When you are able to identify and profile individual web behavior – anonymous or not – suddenly dynamic content and CRM become much more relevant.

You can store individual online scores in the data warehouse, and use this information for targeted campaigns (email, DM, newsletters, SMS, etc.).

Or you can present the visitor with dynamic content based on a database profile stored at a cookie level.

I expect that this will mean that many larger organisations will choose an in-house solution rather than on demand, but that will also involve significant hardware cost due to the massive amount of behavioral data. In fact, the key will be to decide which data to keep.

This post is a response to “What is the future of web analytics?” on the Web Analytics Demystified blog.